Basic Blog Tips

Video Tour of the StumbleUpon Toolbar for Chrome

One of the most popular, yet somewhat elusive, social bookmarking sites by far is StumbleUpon. Many of you have struggled to develop strategies or discover ways to gain maximum exposure from this fantastic community of users and drive targeted traffic to your blogs. Yet, there are others (myself included) who are simply interested in finding relevant articles being shared by other Stumblers and exploring unique content.

StumbleUpon Extension for Chrome

Either way, I'm sure you'll be happy to know that the official SU Google Chrome Toolbar is available for download. Part of the confusion surrounding StumbleUpon, at least for me anyway, is based on the fact that the toolbar is often misunderstood. I recorded this video to walk you through the steps of using this exciting social bookmarking service and all of the features you can access. The toolbar is very interactive and I think the best way to highlight each of the tools is to take them one by one and that way, you can pause the video and experiment as we go along.

Basics of the StumbleUpon Toolbar

In this screencast-o-matic recording, I'll demonstrate the functions of the Google Chrome toolbar which is very similar to the SU toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer.

The key to any level of success with using SU is to install the toolbar for your browser of choice. You'll find that accessing the toolbar makes it easy for you to “stumble upon” articles and users you might like. The SU algorithm integrates your personal areas of interest that you have listed on your profile, the articles you've previously shared, shares from your friends, shares by other users from within the community and other technologies as depicted in the image below.

Su.pr the URL Shortener from StumbleUpon

You might be wondering if there are other ways to access the toolbar even though you don't have the extension installed on your browser. The answer is yes, you can use the su.pr url shortener for any links you share on Twitter or Facebook. Anyone who clicks on a su.pr shortened link will have access to the StumbleUpon toolbar. They will find a prompt on the right-hand side, alerting them to sign in or join the community of Stumblers.

Are you using SU? Tell me what you think of the video and let us know if you have some tips you would like to share. Feel free to link to your profile on SU in your comment so that we can share some great content with the StumbleUpon toolbar for Chrome!

I'm a blogger, podcaster, YouTuber and social media diva (or Social Media Veteran if you like the way that sounds better). True story: I started blogging by accident when I actually thought I was "subscribing" to my daughter Nicole's first blog. Since then I'm committed to helping others avoid all the mistakes I've made along the way. Get one-on-one coaching and exclusive perks when you join my community on Patreon!

That is one of the next steps I was going to introduce in the SBC forum (which I am frustrated to say is still down but hopefully may get fixed when people familiar with that forum software get back from Affiliate Summit).

We have to have ONE place we collectively prioritize where to be active next and share how and who to follow, review, etc. Thanks to Ileane I now follow Michele.

Someone could do a StumbleUpon link roundup that we can all mention and link to in our blogs. The first step is follow each other; then review each other; then consistently review content there.

What I do is write reviews on StumbleUpon short enough to fit on Twitter that include the Twitter username and feed those reviews to Facebook, FriendFeed and Twitter. I need to write that processup.

STUMBLEUPON TIP: Start adding images to call attention to what you share and make them easier to find. Just right click on an image on the page you want to share and select StumbleUpon PhotoBlog It!

Hey Gail, I’m glad I was able to introduce you to Michele. The PhotoBlog tip is new for me. Does that work on Firefox? I don’t see that option in Chrome. Thanks for the feedback and I’ll be sure to keep everyone posted once the SBC forum is back online.

I almost exclusively use FireFox so you should see the PhotoBlog It option if you have the StumbleUpon toolbar in that browser. I use Ubuntu and have Chromium loaded but don’t have Chrome so I don’t know about that.

Either SBC or an alternative solution is a major goal of mine. I’ll be sure to let everyone know when I get that or something to replace it up and running.

The Small Business Internet Marketing post is just as useful for bloggers as small businesses so I hope you’ll check it out. It is huge but there are images to make specific sections easier to find again.

I use Stumbleupon but not as much as I’d like to. Going forward I will tweet, FB Share and Stumble as posts that provide each button. It’s a powerful social bookmarking site that can get you a load of views.

Hey Ryan, I got lucky a few times and ended up with huge traffic spikes coming from StumbleUpon. I can’t say that I used any specific strategy though. Thanks for following me, I’m sure we can find good stories to share.

Great screencast as always Ileane, I haven’t messed with Stumble Upon ever since they shut my account down for the Stumble chain I started amongst bloggers last year. Search it on my blog, you’ll see it 😉

Maybe I’ll signup again real quick since I’m not doing any real work tonight on here anyway. Happy Holidays Ileane

Hey John, are you getting snow down there in Florida? We got it here so bad that they postponed the Eagles Viking game. HA!
StumbleUpon has very specific TOS that are aimed at preventing users from banning together and up-voting each other. I haven’t heard much about it recently, but I think I saw your post last year. Thanks for stopping by John. Enjoy the rest of your Sunday.

Excellent overview Ileane, here are my thoughts and experiences with StumbleUpon for Chrome and the Su.Pr shortener. The SU Toolbar for Chrome is great for stumbles, but is incompatible with Hootsuite website, when SU toolbar is active it prevents you from clicking on the schedule and profile buttons, it seems to offset the “alt text” to where it blocks you from clicking items. This happens on Chrome and Rockmelt for me, not isolated. The Su.Pr link is nice for giving a quick stumble and thumbs up option for readers, but I have many articles I submitted with Su.Pr that showed hundreds of “visits” but really when checking against analytics there were 1/10th as many visits, SU.PR and the SU Badge tracks bots and other irrelevant clicks and therefore is not an accurate measurement for how many pageviews your article is getting.

Justin, thanks for saying that 🙂 I think it’s interesting that we can see traffic spikes coming from StumbleUpon but not with any consistency. Understanding StumbleUpon certainly isn’t straight-forward like other traffic sources. Glad you provided some insights for everyone.

The StumbleUpon app seems to be very helpful. I use Internet Explorer and FireFox, and I like the step by step tutorial you have posted here. Thanks! Maybe I’ll find some sites I have been overlooking : )

Ileane – That was a very detailed video tutorial. I didn’t have a clue about this toolbar until now so thanks for introducing it to me and showing me how to properly utilize it. I use to use StumbleUpon a lot earlier in the year but I haven’t used it much recently. After watching your video i’m ready to start stumbling again with this neat looking toolbar, it should save a load of time. Thanks.

By the way, I’m guessing this toolbar works well with firefox since I am not using chrome. I will find out for myself though.

Thank you for this guide to StumbleUpon, with your tips we can get more benefit from it. I’m already using the SU toolbar for FireFox, but I didn’t know about the su.pr service, so I’m glad I’ve learnt this information.

Thanks for the video tutorial Ileane!
Is StumbleUpon getting you a good amount of traffic? Cause so far I haven’t had any success with it, barely getting 2 – 3 daily hits to my website, and for some reason nobody is following me back..
I really wish I could know how some people are getting thousands of visitors out of it..

Thanks for pointing me out to Ben Wan’s blog
I’ve given it a read, and already started applying some of the tips he’s mentioning there, hopefully they will help improve my profiles at the social media websites

Did you use the plugin on FF too? I use that now, and might be switching over to Chrome soon, but some of the plugins I like aren’t offered (or I’m to lazy to look) on Chrome. Do you think they compare? I love my Stumble this button, the randomness is what makes it for me.

Hey Ileane, Happy New Year! I use Chrome (and it’s big brother Chromium on Linux). I use the toolbar in both of them. You’ve done a fantastic job explaining the features of the StumbleUpon Toolbar for Chrome. As usual, no stone is left unturned.

Chrome users who have been desirous of learning to use the toolbar will find this a great resource. The concepts are explained well enough that even someone who uses one of the other browsers could view your video and easily transfer the knowledge. Thanks for the tour!

May all your dreams for the coming year come to fruition. So happy I met you in 2010! 🙂

Aww how sweet of you to stop by and bring in the new year with me! Your genuine spirit and passion for blogging is reaching me even in cyberspace. Thanks so much for your support and I look forward to working with you in 2011! God bless you in the new year.

What a great video! I see a certain butterfly play a bit part in the production 🙂

I love the idea of StumbleUpon. Your tutorial is a great introduction to what otherwise could be an intimidating user interface. Although the SU developers have enhanced things a bit since I first joined, it’s still a hairy beast with three arms.
The first arm is the toolbar. The second arm is the sharing process. The third arm is the social mishmash of followers and reviewers.

My favorite feature, by far, is the review process. It’s a bit like CommentLuv for websites: give some love, get you some! 🙂 I don’t really know about the metrics, as Justin does, but my WordPress dashboard has counted some impressive traffic spikes.

The dark side of this process is a sin of omission by the SU developers. Unless the information has been added recently, I don’t believe the site ever cautioned users about the pitfalls of over-zealous thumbing up of pages on a single website. Sure, there is the obvious caveat not to overdo it on your own site, but how many people actually know that they could harm the flow of StumbleUpon traffic to a friend’s site if they over-promote it?

Anyway, that major thing aside, I find SU to be a neat resource. I hardly ever go a-stumblin but, whenever I do, I’m always pleasantly surprised at what pages turn up.

Hi Mitch, first I want to thank you for being here today! I know how busy you are 🙂
I noticed a few weeks ago that SU changed the links for our profiles. Here’s the link to yours http://www.stumbleupon.com/stumbler/morphodesigns/
I guess they thought it was important to add the word “stumbler” to the url – but I didn’t find anything official on that from them. Don’t worry, I got this link from your homepage so you don’t need to fix it there. But I noticed a couple of my widgets on different sites needed to be updated with my newer StumbleUpon profile link. I still have this sneaky suspicion that it needs to be fixed somewhere else (maybe FriendFeed – not sure about that).
Anyway, sorry for the digression, but it think it’s important to ponder these things (does that make me super-geeky or what?).

To your point about Stumbling your own posts, I saw tons of debates over this issue early last year, including horror stories about people being banned because they belonged to “Stumble groups”. But recently the noise seems to have quieted down. If you know of something recent, please share any links you come across.

My guess is that the SU algorithm prevents the community from viewing too many links when they are submitted in batches for the same url. I notice that whenever I’m looking at other people’s favorites, if most of the links are coming from the same blog, the view counts don’t go past one or two. Let me know if you see a similar pattern when you’re a-stumbling.
Thanks for the super-geeky chat. 🙂

What a great blog is this? I almost found what I am looking for in this site. From the practical tips and internet tips it’s a complete site.

About the toolbar for chrome, I am now beginning to use it as I have switched my browser from Internet explorer to google chrome. I found chrome a way faster than the first so your tips is very helpful. Keep on coming blogger!!

Yesterday myself and Suresh of seommotips.com had discussion about getting more votes for articles on blogengage, blokube than tweets, likes or stumbles. But your article and video are great tutors for me that how easy stumbleupon is to use for promoting blog articles. Thanks Ileane.

I think I might as well sign up for stumble upon. I like leaving comments because it makes me get to know people . Aside from just sharing ideas, I actually do meet people through comments. I would recommend this to my friends and colleagues like me, they would surely be thrilled. Keep up with the nice and informative posts.

Thank you for this and your other articles that i have read today regarding StumbleUpon. I often red that it is a great site to attract traffic to a blog, but i have never found information telling me how to make this happen, until today. I’m off to give it a go

hat was a very detailed video tutorial. I didn’t have a clue about this toolbar until now so thanks for introducing it to me and showing me how to properly utilize it. I use to use StumbleUpon a lot earlier in the year but I haven’t used it much recently.

About Ms. Ileane

I'm a blogger, podcaster, YouTuber and social media diva (or Social Media Veteran if you like the way that sounds better). True story: I started blogging by accident when I actually thought I was "subscribing" to my daughter Nicole's first blog. Since then I'm committed to helping others avoid all the mistakes I've made along the way. Get one-on-one coaching and exclusive perks when you join my community on Patreon!Read More…